A Minor Chorus: A Novel

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

The stuckness felt like an analogy for my stint as a doctoral student.

The body riots and I’m inside it, bearing witness, interpreting, translating, emoting, and The body is a myth or a ghost or a horror story or a beast of burden, depends on who you ask.

I write because I’ve read and been moved into a position of wonder. I write because I’ve loved and been loved. I want to find out what “we” or “us” I can walk into or build a roof over. To hold hands with others, really. To be less alone.

What I wanted from sex I wanted from writing: to be more fully inside my body without encumbrance, to experience embodiment as something other than a catch-22.

under capitalism to live and work is to be against the population of which you’re a part.

Many of us are relics of an impossible future, too drenched in the past to gesture to anything but loss. We are questions first and foremost, then children. Which means we are half-truths; we are where the boundary of the real intersects with that of the unreal. Children of an invisible war are essentially ghosts.

I’d just been appointed the elegist of the family; it would be my job to lament, to infuse past lives with beauty and meaning, before a congregation of mourners who looked like me. Suddenly I became the family’s writer and, in this, its historian, its coroner.

He had to do alone one of the unavoidable demands our humanness makes of us: submit to the indeterminacy of our feelings, allow them to govern us, however terrifying it is to do so.

But just as we don’t get to choose who we love, as the saying goes, I don’t think we get to choose which kinds of language envelop us like another layer of skin.

Suppose a body were trapped between two parentheses, I thought, made out to be an aside, a distraction, a trace of another narrative possibility. Would you set it free, set it loose on the world?

When you think of me, picture a glistening wreck, something of a piece with the subliminal. The thing about the sublime is that at some point you have to look away.

Love, he realized, can be oppressive simply because it illuminates everything one has turned their back on.

Mothering is about being with others in a context in which mutual flourishing is a shared goal.

Could a place have a soul? If so, what kind of damage would all those decades of child abductions have done to the soul of these communities, to those who benefited from these acts of genocide? It pained me to think about it any further.

It made me pause, because what was nostalgia if not a kind of hunger?

What would my Grindr brethren make of this sort of line of thinking? Did the app make them feel part of a country, allegiant to the same values of lust and self-fabrication, singers of the same anthem of risk and longing?